What's Happening at the Lab in January?

The picture here represents what has been going on in the SWAMP (sample washing and mud processing) lab recently: lots of cleaning, reorganizing, and prep work for the next few weeks. In two weeks I will be heading out on the water for another sampling trip--this time to collect samples in the winter. All of the containers you can see in the top right are now ready to go and are labeled and sorted into the cooler, pictured here bottom left. Meanwhile, I have started processing the samples from the December sampling trip that Dr. Ingels and I went on off the coast of the Marine Lab and the samples from this trip are taking longer than the samples from Panama City. As you can see in the picture below, the sediment is much coarser at the Marine Lab (left) than in the Panama city samples (right), which means that more sediment is being retained on both the large and small sieve. You can also see in the large sieve that there are fragments of shells and other calcium carbonate structures that were relatively absent in a lot of the Panama City samples. Perhaps there is a significant amount of pollution in Panama City that is creating uninhabitable space, or the environmental parameters may not favor shelled organisms like clams and mussels. Although these differences seem small, changes in environmental parameters can have major effects on the communities of organisms that can inhabit the space and the ecosystem processes that happen in a given area.

---

I am still sadly awaiting the delivery of my microplastics extraction chemicals. I got in contact with the supplier and there was a 3 month backorder on the chemical and the rush shipping from another company still has not arrived, which is frustrating. I hope that I can have this sorted out by next week so that I can start the microplastics extractions and take you along on that process.

In the meantime, please send me any questions you have or contact me for collaborations using the contact box found on the home page.